


Kings and Queens

by Welsper



Category: Hylics (Video Game)
Genre: Afterlife, Multi, Past Wayne/Gibby, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-22 03:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20867132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welsper/pseuds/Welsper
Summary: Trade one kingdom for another, leave hatred for love. Turn in life for death and death for life, and all that beyond.





	Kings and Queens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Piinutbutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piinutbutter/gifts).

“I can’t believe we lost to a bunch of _coneheads,” _Wayne said, absolutely baffled as the afterlife opened before them. “How did that happen?”

“Maybe if you did not slack on your training, we wouldn’t be here now!” Pongorma said sternly, with his arms crossed. “Fight me right now, so we may rectify your weaknesses!”

“I wasn’t the one who forgot to cast Mystic Meat in favor of charging straight in, so we all had to take a nap and then woke up here!”

“Naps are good,” Somsnosa said as she threw a pile of meat into the grinder. The loud, wet noise echoed through the endless void.

“Not in the middle of the battle,” Wayne grumbled and scratched the back of his head. He remembered it, he always did. The clay sloughing off his bones and it hurt, it always did, no matter how often he died, no matter how strong he became. Even after Gibby…

“Let’s go build sandcastles!” Somsnosa shouted and ran down the stairs, nearly tripping over a fish on the way down.

“Maybe we will find something interesting buried in the sand!” Dedusmuln mused and followed her, apologizing to the fish who nodded back.

“Wanna come?” Wayne asked Pongorma and pointed down to the quiet red beach stretching out as far as Wayne could see.

“I never much lingered here, before,” Pongorma said as they made their way past the singing, shimmering crystals. “Before you came.”

“It’s nice down there. You could throw the fish too, if you don’t feel like sandcastles.”

Somsnosa had already begun building when they joined and Dedusmuln was beside her, pointing at this and that spire and tower to make sure it was all in the correct place.

“You should take that off, it’s going to rust,” Wayne said and tapped Pongorma’s steelplate.

“Do things rust in the afterlife?”

Wayne shrugged and helped Pongorma undo clasps and buckles. They set his armor down on the stairs, where the water couldn’t reach it. Wayne shrugged of his leather jacket too. There was no hurry to return home. Everyone who might wait for him was already here.

The cries of seagulls carried through the air and Wayne wondered if they were dead too, like the fish. And simply never felt like returning. Maybe one sea was as good as any other to them. Wayne had wondered sometimes if he should stay too, never touch any of the crystals, never return home. Just stay here, on this beach. Wander its shores until that time his clay dried up forever. But that had been before he had met any of them.

“Hey Wayne, does this look right?” Somsnosa waved him over to the little sandcastle she and Dedusmuln had been building. And there it was, tiny and red and crumbling, but it was home. No, something that had been home long ago. The one that Gibby had taken along with him. If he couldn’t have it, no one could. Wayne remembered something like that, similar words, angry screams, when he had fled the first time.

“I’m sorry the real one is gone,” Somsnosa said as Wayne sunk to his knees next to her. He reached out, reshaped some towers and added some stairs where he remembered them being. “It was really pretty.”

“It was,” Wayne said, half a smile on his lips. They watched together as the waves carried the castle out to sea, slowly and gently. The painful, violent memories had overtaken the beautiful ones soon in Wayne’s life, but for all the sorrow he had never wanted that to happen to the Moon. Sometimes he caught himself looking up into the night sky, searching for something that was gone and would never return. Sometimes he forgot the track of time. But one of them always found him and dragged him back to bed. And within that pile of limbs, comfortably draped over each other, and the sounds of quiet breathing and snoring, Wayne never felt like dwelling on the past.

“But I like your house better,” Somsnosa said as the sand was as flat as it had ever been.

“Yeah,” Wayne answered and let his finger glide through the sand. It was warm. “Me too.”

“The ships too,” Dedusmuln added. “Much more convenient than a stationary palace.”

“We can find foes anywhere! The strongest in the universe!” Pongorma shouted and flexed his arms. Somsnosa snorted and slapped him over the head, sending him barrelling face-first into the sand. “We just died to a bunch of coneheads, remember?”

Pongorma grinned back. None of them made any effort to return to the portal just yet. Life was hectic and for them, often painful. In here, they could just… be.

“I guess the universe can wait a little.”

Wayne rose to his feet, wading into the waters until it reached his knees. There hadn’t been any oceans on the Moon.

“Do you know what’s beyond there?” Wayne asked and pointed to the red sea. There was nothing but water, no ships, no boats, no one.

“I am afraid that is outside of my area of expertise.” Dedusmuln stood up and shook the sand from their clothes. They gently bumped their shoulder into Wayne’s and he pressed back for a moment.

“Think we should find out?”

“How are we going to get there?” Pongorma squinted at the endless horizon, but he too, could not make anything out. Water played around his feet, gently washing over them. “It is calm enough around the shores, but deeper waters are treacherous, we can not swim there. Should we perish in the afterlife, that might be the end for us.”

“We got a boat, an airship _and_ a spaceship,” Somsnosa said as she was making sand angels. “We’ll just take one of them.”

“How are we going to get them in here? They’re hardly creatures,” Pongorma said and scratched his head. “They do not die.”

Dedusmuln bent over and picked up Wayne’s jacket from where he had left it in the sand. They shook it off gently, watching red sand corns fall to the ground and be washed away with the waves. Wayne held out his arms and Dedusmuln put the jacket on him, zipped it up and patted the leather over where the heart was, beneath flesh and bone. It beat a little faster for the gentle touch.

“Our clothes come with us, don’t they? What if we extend that bond to the ship?”

“How would we do that?” Somsnosa had gotten to her feet, driven by curiosity. They all liked listening to Dedusmuln and their theories, even Pongorma who usually just had fighting on his mind. They spoke of past artifacts, paper cups and machines that spit out money without having to kill someone for it and a time when things were different, when there were more cities and people who were made not of clay but something else entirely.

“Suppose our clothes come with us because, they belong to us, they fight with us, the same way the horse and the burritos do. Then I propose we bring them with us in a fight! Let them join us in battle as comrades who will come to the afterlife with us!”

“… how?” Wayne narrowed his eyes.

“Oh, I know!” Somsnosa jumped up and down and there was a soggy burrito in her hands and Wayne snorted. “We just throw this at the boat and then they will think it is one of us and will join us here!”

“What a waste of a burrito,” Pongorma huffed and Wayne put an arm around his shoulder.

“Pongorma.”

“Yes?”

“I found that one in a toilet.”

Pongorma stared at him for a while and then shook his head.

“You would think Lunar royalty would have a better education than to go fishing for food in the waste.”

“Gibby was the one for protocols,” Wayne said with a faint smile. Somsnosa squeezed his hand and Wayne squeezed back, thankful for the gesture. For all Gibby had done, for all he had and had not been to Wayne, he missed him. Dedusmuln joined them and wrapped their arms around the three of them and they stood together like this for a while. They were everything to Wayne, in ways Gibby never could have been and had not wanted to be. Somsnosa had been the first, showing him that love did not have to be a twisted thing. She had accepted him, had made a place for him in her heart, reshaping it as easily as the clay that made the world. And just like that, they had let Dedusmuln and Pongorma in too.

Wayne wasn’t sure how it came so easily to him, but sometimes it felt as if the four of them were meant to be. Placed into this world to find each other. And Wayne did not know who made the world, or if someone had made it at all, for all those he ever met in life or afterlife had not put it there. But if there was someone out there, he was thankful to them.

Dracula wasn’t happy about it, trying to get him to fulfill duties, take on responsibilities, fill the void the moon had left behind. That those three were not respectable consorts, not meant to be kings and queens at his side. It didn’t matter to Wayne.

If a kingdom was no place for them, Wayne had no desire to be monarch once more.


End file.
